Time：April 4, 2019, 10:00am-11：30am
Location：Shuhua Multi-functional Hall
Speaker：Prof. Yunde ZHAO, Dean of Botany Department, UC San Diego
Organized by School of Life Sciences and Biotechnology
Contact：Haina Xing (xinghaina@sjtu.edu.cn)

About speaker:

 Dr. Yunde Zhao is a tenure professor at the University of California, a specialist of “The Recruitment Program of Global Experts”, and a Chair Professor of "Yangtze River Scholars" at Nanjing Agricultural University. In 1990, he received a master's degree in microbiology from Shanghai Institute of Pharmaceutical Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, followed byhis Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, United States. He did his postdoctoral research in The Salk Institute. His research interests was the mechanism of auxin in the development process, and made breakthroughs in auxin synthesis, modification, transportation and signal transduction. He has published in Sciences, Cell, Gene and Development, PNAS, Plant Cell, etc. as first author or correspondent author. He was invited to write reviews for  Annual Review of Plant Biology and other journals. Prof. Zhao has more than 10,000 citations withH-index 51.

Abstract:

CRISPR gene editing technologies have revolutionized biology and crop improvement. In this presentation, I will first describe the remaining challenges of gene editing technologies in plants followed by presenting our effort in improving several aspects of CRISPR gene editing technology. I will focus on two main areas of CRISPR technology: Homology-directed DNA repair (HDR) and transgene-free genome editing. HDR has been regarded as the Holy Grail of genome editing in plants and offers unprecedented applications in agriculture.  We have developed new strategies that enabled HDR-based gene replacements in plants. Transgene-free is likely a prerequisite to gain regulatory approval of edited crops. My group has pioneered several strategies that accelerate the isolation of transgene-free, gene-edited plants. Our latest technology allows the isolation of edited, transgene-free plants within a single generation, greatly accelerating crop breeding. I will use editing auxin pathways as an example to demonstrate the power of our new technologies in both basic and applied plant biology.

Please RSVP by 16:00 on April 2, 2019 via the link below:

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/OmL3UfOQ9ELsTCgr327FyA